New Monde Wani play at the festival

[caption id="attachment_210923" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Monde Wani, left, directs ‘The Melting Pot’ cast of, back, Nomsa Wani, Sivu Wani, Jacques Batista and front, Sigqibo Kutase Picture: Mark West[/caption]

Monde Wani hopes his new play isn’t judged only on racial lines and characters are seen for their humanity,

The Port Elizabeth playwright is premiering a new play, The Melting Pot, at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown this week. It tells the story of a black child who is brought up by a white man after he finds him hiding in a chicken coup on his farm. The man’s wife is killed in a farm attack and the baby appears to be the only survivor.

Wani is well known in the city for The Rivonia Trial, the one-man play he wrote which explores the trial of Nelson Mandela on sabotage charges in 1964.

The Rivonia Trial has been performed on international stages but Wani’s proudest moment was performing the play in front of Nelson Mandela and the other surviving Rivonia defendants.

Rehearsing in Govan Mbeki Avenue last week, ahead of the festival, Wani said he hoped audiences would not judge the piece purely on racial lines.

He is against compartmentalising people, loving the quote by Dennis Goldberg in The Rivonia Trial: “don’t look at people in terms of their colour, see people, just people.”

“If you break The Melting Pot down in terms of race, in it black people attack white people, a black man helps save a white woman, a white man saves a black baby, and a white man betrays a white woman. It’s about human life. I don’t want it to be a racist thing.

“When it becomes a racial story, they oversimplify it and the failure of racism is that it takes us out of being human beings. If we are able to see ourselves as human beings, there is no space to be racist,” Wani said.

The versatile playwright and actor also has a flair for humour and has opened for the 99 per cent Xhosa comedy shows, and has staged a light one-man show at the Opera House, How I Met My Wife.

He does not appear in The Melting Pot but directs a cast of four. Sigqibo Kutase plays Thando, the son, and Jacques Batista plays Mr Wessels, the father; Sivu Wani plays his sister and Nomsa Wani his long-lost mother.

“The story is about a black boy who grows up in a white Afrikaans home. He knows only this man as his father and in turn [the father] doesn’t have a wife or other children, he only has this boy.

“The boy now really wants to know who he is, and it unlocks the painful past for both of them. It’s a story of broken people; broken characters because the father then has to go back and unlock the door to the past.

"There is one line that is very powerful for South Africa as a society battling to find out who it is and that is, ‘Promise me: Pieter and Son’,” said Wani, saying this referred to the wording on the sign Mr Wessels hoped to put up over his office one day, referring to Thando as his son.

“That one line is about people finding and reaching out to each other. As an actor you are always responsive to the happenings around you, so that theatre becomes relevant to the community.”

Wani promises the play will “definitely” be performed in Port Elizabeth after the festival, although perhaps with a larger cast and a longer running time.

“We’ve only got one hour in Grahamstown but it originally was planned as a musical, and as a revelation that people are people, no matter what culture they come from,” explained the writer.

“I wanted to do something using boeremusiek and African music, that’s why we called it The Melting Pot. When we do it big we will have a band. I can already hear the sound of the boeremusiek!”

• The Melting Pot opened yesterday and is on daily at the Dutch Reformed Church Hall until Saturday. Visit the website for times.